Speaker: Shih-Diing Liu (刘世鼎), Professor of Communication and Senior Research Fellow, Institute of Advanced Studies, University of Macau
Discussant: Susan Greenhalgh, Professor of Anthropology; John King and Wilma Cannon Fairbank Professor of Chinese Society, Harvard University

This presentation has two intertwined goals: to highlight the significance of gender in understanding Chinese society and to underscore the role of emotion in shaping gender dynamics in China and beyond. I will develop my discussion by revisiting Engendering China: Women, Culture, and the State, an edited volume published by Harvard University Press in 1994, just before the landmark Beijing Women’s Forum in 1995. Through a symptomatic reading of Engendering China, I articulate my perspective on the gender-emotion nexus—an articulation often overlooked not only in Chinese studies but also in gender studies more broadly. Rather than focusing on the conventional notion of gender “consciousness,” I advocate for a critical inquiry into gender “emotion” –  to explore the deeply felt but often unrecognized and repressed dimensions of gendered feelings, experiences, fantasies, investments, promises, and practices. My analysis of pop culture and stardom illustrates that gender power operates not merely through structural imposition but through emotions. By recontextualizing Judith Butler’s polemic Who’s Afraid of Gender? (2024), my presentation examines how the return of the repressed—including emotions such as fear, anxiety, optimism, and frustration—shapes the gender landscape, offering new insights into both its constraints and possibilities for emancipation.

Shih-Diing Liu (刘世鼎) is Professor of Communication and a Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of Advanced Studies, University of Macau. Liu’s research focuses on exploring the emotional dynamics of politics, the formation of popular identity, the expressive and embodied forms of political practices, and the psychology of nationalism in contemporary China. His books include The Politics of People: Protest Cultures in China (SUNY Press, 2019) and Affective Spaces: The Cultural Politics of Emotion in China (Edinburgh University Press, 2024, with Wei Shi). Continuing with a focus on emotion from the Affective Spaces project, his current research explores the intersection of affect and gender in contemporary China. Arguing that Chinese gender has increasingly become an archive of feelings marked by ambivalence toward authorities, this book project uncovers the power of emotion in negotiating the gendered order. Meanwhile, he is also working on a book project that explores the emotional capabilities of Artificial Intelligence.

Susan Greenhalgh (葛苏珊) is Professor of Anthropology and John King and Wilma Cannon Fairbank Professor of Chinese Society at Harvard University. Before moving to Harvard, she was Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Irvine and, before that, Senior Research Associate of the NYC-based Population Council.

In April 2016, Greenhalgh was named Fellow of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation for twelve months starting July 2016. At Harvard, she was named Walter Channing Cabot Fellow for the year for the 2015 publication of her book, Fat-talk Nation. Her most recent book is Soda Science: Making the World Safe for Coca-Cola